Anqi (Angela) Chen is a New York-based UX Designer who is dedicated to using UX design for social impact, particularly at the intersection of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and design. She crafts human-centered design solutions that stem from her observation of the day-to-day details of how people engage with technologies. Angela’s interdisciplinary background, coupled with her deep empathy and creativity empowers her to create original designs that are impactful, sustainable, and have great potential to bring goodness to the world. As a result, she has received several prestigious international awards for her design. In this article, we’ll dive into one of her iconic designs, Calmspace, to illustrate Angela’s design approach and the impact she’s making through her design.

The Calmspace Mobile App

Calmspace is a mobile app designed to address technology-induced anxiety in college and grad-school students or young working professionals. Calmspace is Angela’s independent design and it represents a creative and impactful contribution to the fields of wellness and digital communication for young adults.

The concept of Calmspace was born out of Angela’s observation during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the prevalence of anxiety among young adults increased due to the constant digital connectivity and even digital addiction enforced by remote work and remote learning. Recognizing this issue, she envisioned Calmspace as a mobile app tailored to alleviate technology-induced anxiety among young adults in educational and professional settings.

Innovation through New Business Model Design: The Reward Program

Calmspace is a true trailblazer in the field of digital wellness, because for the first time, the app’s user experience design is integrated with a unique business model based on its user needs and individual spending behavior. When Angela was designing the app, she conducted user interview to understand the pain-points of young adults, which led her to realize, most of these potential users have a very limited budget. That is how Angela came up with the original idea, a first-of-its-kind reward program within the wellness app.

The Calmspace Reward Program incentivizes users to engage with the platform by providing opportunities to learn about digital anxiety, earn credits through quizzes, and invite friends for free sessions. Users can also track their well-being performance through a smart-analysis dashboard in the profile.

In this unprecedented way, the app not only accounts for the concerns of budget among young adults, but also sustains its own business and development. As a designer, Angela’s holistic thinking enables her to come up with such innovative solutions that combine business, human and technologies into a meaningful and sustainable solution that empowers young adults to alleviate their common technology-induced anxiety.

Design for Digital Wellness

Calmspace employs a beautiful and smooth visual system that resonates with Gen-Z sensibilities where the colors represent peace and love, offering a safe, caring, stress-free environment that can motivate users to be more aware of digital anxiety and self-care. Besides colors, Calmspace uses Poppins as the only typeface because of its readability, simplicity and thematic match with the colors.

By combining aesthetics with functionality, Calmspace aims to foster happiness and encourage proactive digital interactions, ultimately promoting a healthier digital lifestyle. Angela explored socio-psychological methodologies such as positive reinforcement to understand about the needs and preferences of the product’s user group. When making these design choices, Angela leaned on her interdisciplinary knowledge of psychology, graphic design, typography, and weaved them together beautifully into one mindful solution.

Social Impact of Calmspace

Anxiety has become a common issue amongst society and data suggests an increase of 1.56% in anxiety among young American adults. It is believed that during the pandemic, the limited access to physical contact “forced” them to get addicted to phones and laptops that caused 67% people-at-home to report increasing anxiety. Calmspace, as the first app concept in such a wellness-trending field, breaks the long-existing dilemma for young adults to manage their mental well-being using digital tech and their “always socially connected” existence.

Calmspace aims to design an intuitive, accessible experience to raise people's awareness of mental well-being, promote a healthier lifestyle, and help young adults get rid of their digital addictions and develop a more balanced relationship with digital technologies.

Award-Winning Design

Calmspace has won a list of internationally renowned design awards, including two silver awards from MUSE Design Awards 2024 in Conceptual Design - Wellness and Communication categories, one A’ Design Award from A’ Design Awards & Competition 2024 in the Mobile Technologies, Applications and Software Design Awards category, and one silver award from NY Product Design Award 2024 in its User Experience category.

Additionally, Angela has been invited to attend the A’ Design’s award ceremony and exhibition of her award-winning design Calmspace as a winner, this summer in July 2024 at Como, Italy, where only 900 guests are being invited to the event. It is a testimony to the success of the Calmspace app and the outstanding achievements Angela has gained as a designer.

Design with Purpose and Mission

As Angela reflects on her design journey, she reminds us of the importance of designing with a mission. For her, it’s almost about humanizing technology, and using technology to help individuals live a happier, calmer, and more fulfilling life. Angela’s design stands as a pioneering example of the meaningful innovations we need in this hyper-connected age. And we’ll stay tuned for her continued success in the field of user experience design.